We need more calm companies
justinjackson.ca
justinjackson.ca
Several years ago we were acquired by Siemens. They continued to invest in our group and expand it, even through the pandemic, always with an eye on steady, sustainable growth. Of course there are always targets to hit and people feeling pressured to hit them, but nobody is afraid of losing their job or being asked to work overtime. There always has been and continues to be a culture of work life balance; happy and healthy employees are productive and stick around.
I know lots of other people in my industry and in my area who have similarly calm jobs, whether smaller startups or larger, mature companies. Around here, it's the norm, not the exception.
The thing is, you don't hear about those companies in the news. It's the ones who are frantically hiring and firing that get people's attention. Everyone else just quietly goes about their business.
What shook me up is when top performing coworkers were "laid off" because, due to recent downmarket conditions, there were slightly less competent candidates available at a heavy discount. These top performing coworkers worked extremely hard, were great at their jobs and often sacrificed personally when the company needed them but they were good negotiators as well and had negotiated good, above market salaries.
Once the project took off, the owners fired them and replaced them with cheaper workers who weren't as good but good enough to maintain and update the product.
It feels to me like the owners gave these people an impression that they would be long term employees, where their short term sacrifices would pay off long term, but effectively used them as flat rate contractors while paying them employee rates (instead of contractor rates).
I wish there was a way to detect such owners.
They are the quiet, stable, regional, unsexy businesses that have been around for 40 years. I have a friend who is an SWE at a large regional insurance broker. Very calm work indeed.
They just don’t pay SV wages.
As a candidate, how do you separate this kind of company from one where the owners are cheap and want to pay you as less as possible?
There are a lot of companies that advertise terrific WLB, pictures of their employees and their families laughing only to find out none of those employees work there any longer and the pictures were taken on their once-every-10-years retreat at a cheap hotel in MO or WY.
In my experience you tend to find many more penny pinching owners in the world of small businesses, not at a 1000-person regional life insurance company.
It also inspired me to do better and look at my own company and myself as a fellow founder. I agree with almost everything he said and I'd like to see my company as being a "Calm Company" too. It's a great opportunity to measure my ideas against other's.
I wish more entrepreneurs would post like that, even if it's not 100% selfless. I think the trade off of getting more eye balls for sharing his vision is totally fair.
Time and again I keep seeing articles like this in HN and it's the reason I'm so addicted. It's such a good filter on all the chaotic crap it's out there.
And other fund with this same model: https://tinyseed.com
I wouldn't make that claim - it's about the mindset. I've seen plenty of privately owned companies where the owners heavily churn through employees extracting as much as they can from each person and spitting them out.
Their attitude is "I can't pay at or above market, so this employee will eventually leave, so why should I invest in this employee? Let me extract as much as I can while they are here"
the people who work on and buy the product suffer. Good employees are fired, and useful products are shut down.
Speaking generally: Public companies live in a state of pressure to exploit everything possible to the benefit of shareholders and execs.
It's increasingly difficult to see how benefiting this small group outweighs the massive and ceaseless costs to society as a whole.
Pick any software business - productivity tools, marketing, data providers, security, UX, medical/healthcare - and the reality is always that 1-5 big companies dominate, while 100s or 1000s of smaller companies, many that fit with the ideas of the "calm company" philosophy, are profitable and even growing (albeit more slowly).
The "winner take all" mentality isn't even true in the sectors where it's supposed to be a hard and fast rule. Social media platforms have a half dozen dominant players, and another 40-50 businesses that are successful by the calm definition. Search engines - Google dominates, but another half dozen and a few hundred vertical search engines (in travel, B2B data, real estate, ecommerce of every kind, etc.) have 10s to 100s of millions in revenue.
Until I see an economy-wide analysis of this "winner takes all" rule, with massive numbers of sectors where no small/calm companies are surviving, will I believe this is true. Seems to me like the "riches in the niches" saying is actually the rule, but it doesn't fit with the unicorn-or-bust returns model of large venture funds.
The grow-fast-or-die-trying approach that Silicon Valley (and YCombinator) promoted in tech world the last quarter century leads to millions of miserable folks (employees, customers, and founders) and a few very rich ones. After trying that approach for a long time, it just doesn't bring me motivation or joy.
(btw, big fan of Lost and Founder).
Explain more. Also, ensure you're not conflating "calm companies" with "cheap companies" where the owners are focused on spending as little money as possible, including paying people as little money as possible and claim they spend so little in order to "spend responsibly" - those places are depressing and I am curious if there's a way to detect "calm companies" from "cheap companies"